I was hoping I’d like this one, since I’m generally a big fan of both excessive detail and examinations of conspiracy theory. I hate to say it, but aside from a few bright spots, this book was largely just excruciating drudgery.

In a time where it seems like all it takes to fall down a conspiracist rabbit hole is hearing someone say a thing and just believing it, it’s almost refreshing to spend time in what feels like a more “classical” version of conspiracy theory. Foucault’s Pendulum dissects that experience, in which adherents had to put in hours upon hours of work and research to find their next mystical link, the search was driven by a desperate desire for meaning, and the rabbit hole was more a matter of contagion for the precariously detail-oriented.

That sounds fun to me, and I think there probably are versions of this premise that would’ve been fun. This book wasn’t fun.

Not every book has to be fun, of course; there are plenty of other virtues a book can have. The writing on a line level was absolutely stunning. I’ve rarely seen a writer with such an impressive command over their vocabulary, and there were sentences here and there that almost read like works of art. Some of the main characters were so well fleshed-out that I felt like I was looking at an X-ray of their psyche, and for others, just as full a picture was painted by what wasn’t said about them. This book had a lot to say about the dark places we can end up if we let our intellect run amok in the field of our psychological vulnerabilities. It’s also a very effective satire in a lot of ways. But I didn’t like it.

Eco was obviously a great writer, but I’m not sure this book works as a novel. I’m not generally a huge “author’s intent” person, but the goals of this book so clearly diverge from the goals of most novels that I feel obligated to acknowledge the difference. @Punny pointed me toward Eco’s afterword to The Name of the Rose, where he explains that he sees the first hundred pages of a novel as an opportunity to construct an ideal reader who can handle the rest of the book: “Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.” It’s hard to reject an entire writing philosophy out of hand, but I don’t think I appreciate Eco’s approach.

The vast majority of this book is infodumping. This is the kind of book where one character says to another, “So tell me about the Knights Templar,” and he does, for 40 pages. If you’re not absolutely rabid for minutiae about the Knights Templar, it’s a slog. And it never ends. The whole novel is like that. It’s a perfectly appropriate representation of an academic spiraling into obsession and losing his grip on reality, but if the reader doesn’t share that obsession, it’s very difficult to stay interested.

If I found this book “demanding or difficult,” it wasn’t in the sense of confusion or intellectual challenge; it was just a matter of engagement. And for a novel that’s so interested in the psychology of interpretation, it leaves surprisingly little room for ambiguity—any time I felt compelled to do a little interpreting, the opportunity was almost invariably snatched from me. When I wanted to do some character analysis, the book immediately explained exactly what drove the character and where it came from, and when I wanted to sit down with some thematic analysis at the end, the main character had his own thinking session about what it all meant. There was a lot in the book, but in the end, there just wasn’t much left for me to do.

There were one or two truly stellar passages in this book, there were parts I liked okay, there were parts where I wished I were better at skimming, and there were parts where I hated the whole damn thing and regretted ever picking it up. Not everyone feels this way—it’s a widely beloved book, and there are readers out there who fit Eco’s image of the ideal reader. I guess I’m just not one of them.

This book wasn’t perfect, but I enjoyed reading most of it.

I loved the premise and the thematic aims of this book, and that was enough to carry me through about 75% of it. It’s a nice story—there’s sentient moss with attitude, there’s friendship, there’s space, and it refuses to touch stress or tension with a ten-foot pole. That’s a great list of qualifications for certain circumstances; if you’re feeling unwell like I was when I read this, it might be exactly what you need. I could see where it might be lacking, but the journey was pleasant enough that I didn’t really mind. Around the three-quarters mark, though, either I started feeling well enough to be crabby about it, or its foibles suddenly got harder to ignore, because I finished the book with slightly more resentment than fondness.

Considering how often I say I just want books where everyone is friends, you’d think I’d have been thrilled that everyone is friends in this book. Friendship in fiction takes work to establish convincingly, though, and automatic, unearned friendship is often grating rather than sweet. A lot of the selling points of this book felt automatic and unearned. It’s a found-family book, but the family it finds feels contrived and convenient; it’s a cozy sci-fi, but the coziness feels manufactured and artificial. There’s a moment later in the book involving a robot that looks like a cute animal, and we’re so clearly expected to find it adorable that it almost made me angry. This book felt like cozy soup—it had all the ingredients that should make a book feel cozy, but it just didn’t feel properly cooked.

You can clearly see the debt this book owes to the Murderbot series (it’s not at all similar in tone, but Moss seems like an obvious mashup of Murderbot and ART), and the author isn’t reluctant to admit it; one of the first things she mentions in the Acknowledgements is that she had the idea for this book after reading Murderbot. I don’t have an issue with inspiration, but I think anyone who opens this book expecting it to be like Murderbot might end up disappointed.

The characterization in this book felt inconsistent and a little thoughtless, the thematic handling was blunted by overexplanation, and I was unimpressed with the prose and dialogue. It was cute and fun, but overall pretty unconvincing for me.

I don’t think everyone will have problems with this book, and I also don’t think everyone who has problems with it will have those problems all the time—I mentioned I was sick while reading it, and I do think it’s a very good Sick Day book. It is cute and fun, and sometimes that’s all we’re looking for. Despite all my complaining, I’ll be keeping an eye out for the sequel—maybe it’ll be just what I need when I feel like garbage and need cheering up.